BitTorrent Chat: The Want For Privacy

BitTorrent Chat: The Want For Privacy

BitTorrent’s Jaehee Lee offers insight into the development of BitTorrent’s new chat application, focused on how we are addressing the various needs of privacy.

We’ve just released an internal Alpha and wanted to share some of the key learnings from our development process. When our product and engineering teams sat down for our initial brainstorming of the most important features for our upcoming chat application, we all agreed on one thing: The central focus would be around privacy.
So we’ve been doing a lot of serious thinking and research on the issue, particularly as it applies to communicating. What is apparent, as many of you may already know, is that “privacy” in a chat application can mean different things to different people.

To some, what counts most is what’s under the hood. What differentiates the application to ensure that metadata and content remain private? To others, privacy means having social autonomy, private time with the person or people they are talking to; the application should just work. The privacy scenarios include:

Journalists communicating with sources without exposing their identity or content being shared

Members of the diplomatic corps sharing private dispatches

Keeping business communications confidential, safe from leaks, and safe from industrial espionage

Keeping your conversations private amongst friends

The list can go on. But privacy is, ultimately, the ability to express oneself freely with autonomy and to feel safe doing so. To not worry that the wrong friend will see a message that wasn’t intended for them.

Engineering For Privacy

We realized that there would never be a single message delivery method that was ideally private to all users in all situations. This led us to ask new questions that explored how we could create a chat app that solves different problems for different people, and is transparent in signalling the level of privacy in every use case.

From an engineering perspective, there are specific solutions to address each scenario. For communication between two trusted parties, peer-to-peer (or device-to-device) is optimal.

But there are scenarios where your identity or metadata may need to be obscured from the person with whom you are communicating. The journalist communicating with a source who may be under threat of danger, for instance. For these instances there will be a way to communicate without any need for personal or identifiable information. There will be an additional setting for routing communiques via a relay server to obscure metadata. It will function much like a VPN: the IP address will touch the relay server, but no metadata will be collected or stored. The content is encrypted from end-to-end and never exposed to a third party.

We deliberated further. What if we created a way to inform users of how their messages were being routed and so they could decide for themselves if they feel comfortable chatting through that connection? What if we allowed them to choose a specific type of connection?

Privacy And Convenience

To start, users will be able to choose how they use our chat app. If you are porting in contact lists, you have the convenience of signing up with email or with a phone number. You will also have the option to sign up in Incognito mode, using no such information at all.

What we are building for the Alpha will also address users communicating with a trusted source who prefer their communication to be device-to-device (decentralized). This means no hops through any 3rd party servers, and no chance of anything being intercepted.

For users who may prefer to have their metadata obscured, messages will be indirect and routed through a third node. It is all a matter of preference.

We think these considerations are important, and we’re coming up with what we believe to be some great ways to give people control over their conversations.

Future posts will discuss more details of our chat app. For now, the team here is putting the internal release through it’s paces. The private alpha launch is right around the corner, and it represents just the beginning of what our vision is for a privacy-centered chat application. We can’t wait to share it with you.

To be invited as an Alpha tester, sign up here:

Share this:

Jaehee Lee is a Senior Product Manager at BitTorrent, Inc. He has a passion for working on new product ideas and strategy. Jaehee believes that great products solve a problem in the the simplest way possible. He also knows that understanding and working with users is essential to the process of building the product. He is a graduate of UC Davis and loves golf.

I signed up day one for the alpha last year, I’m pretty excited to see how it turns out.

I also thought about the routing, there should be 3 ways

1. Direct connection
2. Connect over random people of your friends list, when they allow it
3. Connect over random people from the swarm, when they allow it

This should be all client side, so that an observer can not tell, whether you are connecting directly, a friend or swarm.

Alan

I’m very curious to see how this turns out. My girlfriend and I(long distance relationship) have had several issues with targeted hacking attacks, and I’m desperately looking for a secure cross-platform chat program to solve this issue. She’s generally on her laptop, with me either on the PC or my iPhone, although I may go android next time. She’s very non computer savvy, so for it to work for us it would need to be pretty easy to use. One time setup might be do-able as long as it’s simple to use thereafter, but anything that requires frequent attention would not fly for us.

Waiting with interest.

ricky5

Wahhh Bittorrent too came in the Chat market. Its true that the market is filled with some big giants like Whatsapp, Viber and minors like Photo4tune, Linechat, We chat. Now a days, data privacy is big cocern and many big players in the suspect list

IsacDaavid

Tox:
- Open source/free as in freedom
- Works with Tor, proxies and VPN’s
- No ads
- Communications are guaranteed to be distributed/non-centralized
- Easy to audit, easy to look at code and verify it

Bleep
- non-libre
- ads
- “anonymous” option uses centralized servers which means you’re not really anonymous
- No way to verify that your information isn’t being relayed to -insert 3 letter agency here- servers
- No way to verify encryption or security or anything else it claims to do